Nighttime is the Worst
by Underground Homesick Alien
Summary: An MNU soldier ponders his efforts to secretly save non-humans. Oneshot.


District 9 is my absolute favorite movie ever and this site is really awesome. Here is my first story, hope you enjoy it, feel free to leave feedback if you don't.

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Nighttime is the worst.

On the job, driving around in a truck, music blasting in my ears and above all with MNU painted on my armor in big black letters, it's possible to relax and pretend like everything's okay. Like since what we're doing is considered legal that also means its moral, ethical, "right".

Having my friends beside me makes it easier. When I feel personal discomfort, they are the reason why I can tell myself to put it aside. For the team. Because we all rely on each other. I owe it to them to keep it together until at least the end of the shift.

It's harder when I'm standing alone, pointing a gun at some prawn and screaming at him to get back in his tent or when I'm with the others in the truck but I'm the one with the machine gun in my hands. Whether the prawn that we catch out of bounds or is just unlucky enough to come across us will live or die or just get hurt is entirely up to me.

So, even with the excitement and adrenaline of a half dozen friends of mine, pressed up around me, yelling for me to do it, even in the moments when I _have_ to pull the trigger and it seems as though it was a group effort or decision, I'm alone.

I try not to, and when I have to, when I can't excuse myself because I can't say that I've run out of ammunition or persuade the others that this will look bad if we don't have a good reason for it, I try to make the wound non-fatal. But you can only get away with so many non-fatal wounds and still be the shooter. Due to the expanding population the unwritten rules of MNU state that any soldier who doesn't kill at least one prawn a month is "going soft" and shouldn't be a soldier anymore.

If someone else becomes a soldier or takes my place at the gun turret, they'll cause more deaths than I do.

Not to say that all prawns that we come across are innocent. Some of them have got just as much human blood on their hands as I have prawn blood on mine. Some of them--they're very rare, but they do happen--seem to enjoy meticulously stalking humans late at night and wildly open fire on them with the few weapons they've managed to smuggle into the new district.

There is a sense of justice in ending that kind of prawn. But no satisfaction. For every violent prawn I've stopped, I'm sure that I've wounded at least ten or fifteen more, so I am still more guilty than they were.

And, after what we've done to them, haven't they got the right to strike back against us?

These are the debates that keep me restless and awake at night, particularly after a busy shift. If I was in their situation, would I truly care about the laws they would enforce on me? Would I want to play by their rules or would I want revenge?

Would I care if the people I hurt were police officers or not? And if I didn't, and I wouldn't, how can I expect them to act better than me, especially with what MNU has been doing to them?

It wasn't always like this. When I got the job I was an eager young recruit, barely out of my teens, tired of working menial minimum-wage factory jobs. I wanted to do something. I wanted to make a difference.

My parents. I remember them. When I got the job with MNU my mom baked me a cake and my dad took me aside and had a Serious Talk with me. He had been in the army and the job was one of the only things we could really connect over. Those were good memories. I thought then that I was doing the right thing, that they were proud of me for the right reasons. That everything was going to be okay. The job gave me money and respect, and while I didn't like parts of it back then, when my job required me to, I didn't shy away from it.

Then the truth about MNU's medical experiments came out after the ship left and my father still kept acting the same way, grinning over his dinner as he'd ask me how many prawns I'd killed that day. I finally left home shortly after that, but my memory of him never changed. I used to act like mom did for a while, acknowledging that MNU's experiments were bad but that security was still needed to keep the people of Johannesburg safe.

Then I realized that we, my buddies and the rest of the people I had worked with, might have been part of that section of MNU too. It occurred to me that if someone had picked me for that job I would have accepted at once, eager to please, and then I would have ended up in jail or splattered all over the ground and all people would have remembered of me was that I had contributed to what happened in District 9.

MNU is contaminated. Johannesburg needs to be policed, yes, but by a real police force trained not to use their weapons rather than soldiers instructed to do the opposite. Everything I do for them, even the good things I may accomplish, is spoiled by the MNU's past.

That's why my kill-rate began to drop after the spaceship left. While everyone around me got more intense, while the violence (200 miles away from the city, so no one would ever see or hear about it) escalated while the population seemed to stay the same, I was the one who kept a cool head, kept my safety on and _always_ thought twice before pulling the trigger. I kept listening to the same music, wearing the same armor and talking the same talk with my friends, but inside I knew that I had changed.

So that when the spaceships come down again, even if I'm sent out to the front and am instantly blown to pieces by some unimaginable prawn weapon, even if I'm thought of as just another one of MNU's soldier's, I'll know the difference. I'll know that I tried, in my weak, barely-noticable way, to do the right thing.

But none of this helps at night, because at night, especially when I'm away from my apartment, sleeping overnight outside of the new district, it's harder to tell myself these things and believe them. At night all I can hear is the accusations of an activist who somehow got into the barracks that morning, waving a microphone in my face and asking me how I can live with myself. All I can see is the face of my father, leaning forward expectantly as I tell him about that day's work.

And I see other faces, too, faces that look the same except for their colorings, plated insect faces smeared with dirt, garbage, and an MNU sticker on the back of their heads, wide eyes pleading silently with me to put the gun down, clicking noises I can't understand half the time.

I want to speak freely to them, want to take them aside, calm them down and have a real conversation with them. I want to be able to tell them that I'm not angry, to whisper to them that I'm different, that I care about them, that I'm not like the others around me, that most people on earth aren't like them either.

But I can't. All I can do is put the gun down, or shoot them in the foot if my friends are standing around, and hope they recognize that I just spared them their life.

Because if all they see of the human race is a snarling pack of savages pointing weapons, conducting medical experiments and yelling orders, the second or third ship that shows up here won't be a rescue mission, it'll be a battleship.

That's why nighttimes are the worst. Because I have to decide how many more prawns I can flat-out save before MNU gets suspicious. Because sometimes, in the middle of a riot, I have to choose between the lives of humans and the lives of prawns. Because I'm not sure if anything I'm doing, my pathetic little resistance, will have any effect or leave any kind of mark. Because I've tried drinking, partying, smoking, traveling...and nothing helps to relieve the pressure on my mind.

But through it all is a certainty: someone has to do this job. Someone has to work from the inside. Someone soldier enough to know how to aim precisely while running and human enough to know when not to pull the trigger at all.

And so, on nights like this, I take a sleeping pill.

And rest up for my shift the next morning.


End file.
